As fun as those seven days were, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I am SO glad that it is OVER. School ended for me last Thursday and inspired a HUGE sigh of relief. I no longer have to worry about studying and going to class while also trying to recover from tests (ahem… spinal tap) and side effects from medication and my health condition in general.
So. I’ve decided that my doctors have until August 24th to get this all taken care of and straightened out. (August 24th is when I start the fall semester in which I am signed up for 15 no-nonsense-work-your-ass-off credit hours.) I have BIG plans (pharmacy school, anyone?) and have ZERO intention of letting a freaking pseudotumor get in my way. If RSD didn’t knock me out of the game, I’ll be damned if I let a stupid pseudotumor do that job.

I’ve also decided that I really do not like this whole pseudotumor-cerebriraman amplifier situation. The more I read, the more freaked out I become. All I want is information… but the more “information” (aka: internet articles) I come across the more I am freaked out. Now, I haven’t heard this from my doctors yet, but apparently, if the “information” (seriously, can you really trust the internet in matters like this?) is to be believed, if the medication does not work then I am facing having to get surgery to put some sort of shunt in my head to reduce the flow of spinal fluid to my brain. Ummmmm… brain surgery in any capacity? That would be no. No.No.NO. (See how I freak out?) I am trying to just wait until I talk to my doctors again and not flip out until they give me reason to…. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

It is absolutely NOT helping that the medication that makes me pee like I’m ten thousand months pregnant doesn’t seem to be working. Oh, I ‘m getting all of the expected side effects (plus the fun unexpected side effect of the stupid medication actually making my RSD WORSE) but the vision in my right eye seems to be worsening, not getting better… Now, I am no doctor, but I’m thinking that this cannot be good. When this whole adventure started, I had a crescent-shaped haze at the very bottom of my vision… think like a quarter-moon kind of shape. Now I have like a HALF-MOON’s worth of haze at the bottom of the vision in my right eye. Umyeah.
If you’re thinking, “Wow. That would probably be sooooo annoying,” you would be dead.on.

Yes. I am all kinds of spooked about my vision worsening. Yes. I am all kinds of pissed off about my RSD getting worse because of this medication. I literally have not slept the night through in about two weeks because I get woken up by the “tingling sensation” in my feet. (Tingling sensation… yeah right. More like someone jabbing small knives into the bottom of my feet sensation.) My RSD foot is usually swollen to some degree now and is usually the color of red kool-aid. Basically, what I’m getting at is that I don’t want to take this medication if it’s not going to work. Because HELLO! My foot is killin’ me (worse than usual) and if it because of this medication that isn’t doing its job anyway… uh…. nothanks.

Monday, July 13th, is the day. The day the eye doctor gives me the verdict on whether or not the swelling in the optic nerve in my right eye has gone down at all. Despite the fact that I am 99.9% sure that my vision has worsened over the last few weeks, I am still hoping that he will tell me that the optic nerve is no longer swollen or no longer as swollen. I really, really want this medication to work… even though it is making my RSD worse. I do NOT want to get a shunt put into my head. That sounds painful, expensive, and like it would take a while to recover from. So. At this point I am just trying to will my optic nerve to calm the heck down and stop being swollen already. (I don’t know if my mind power is strong enough to make my body do what I want it to… but it’s worth a shot, right? RIGHT? ~on the edge of having a panic attack right now~)

Uhhh… Moving on to happier things.
Our fourth of July was fun! (Even though Simon got bit by a mosquito right by his eye and spent much of the fourth nursing his red and swollen eye…)
We started the fourth off by doing nothing for most of the day (which was awesome). Then we took the kids to the driving range for a few hours (family fun for all).
Then we moved on to go and check out the local fireworks scene.
We saw these:

Tried to take some family pictures while watching big fireworks:

But those didn’t really turn out (as usual) so we just watched more of these:

Alright. Nello.Out.
I am busy warding off a headache and the backlight from my laptop is doing me no favors at this point.

Tyson looks at me and asks, “What do you need, Lady?”

“I need you to kill me. Kill me Jerry.” I smile at our Seinfeld joke. (Ah. Seinfeld was hilarious, wasn’t it?)

“How do you want me to do it?”

“Just make it fast.”

“Alright. How about I just flick you in the the forehead to death? You know… just flick you on your forehead until you die….”

I laugh. Because I find that scene in my mind to be really, really funny.

Man. I hate it when he makes me laugh away my cries…..
(And when I say “hate”, I really mean that this is just one more thing for me to confess that he does right…)

~Wanna see what my view has been like for the last SIX FREAKING days? (I knew you would… that’s why I took a photo for all to share in my woe.)

Anyway.
So the play-by-play of a spinal tap goes something like this (in case you ever find yourself in need of one, at least you will know what to expect… unlike me)
***
I walked back to the procedure area where I immediately commenced with a HUGE internal, that soon turned external, freakout. I really don’t know what came over me except that all of the sudden all I could think about was that someone was about to jab an extra-long needle so far into my back that it would probably get perilously close to my lungs. Obviously I was having a slight overreaction. (Let us be sure to emphasize the word, “slight”.)
One of the techs, whose name was Katie, asked me if I was ok.
Ha! “Am I ok”, I thought? AM I OK?! I wanted to scream at her, “Would YOU be ok?”
Even though my mind was screaming at Katie, my mouth did not.
I just politely told her that I was having a rather large attack of the nerves, to which she responded by telling me that she understood but that everything was going to be “ok”. (Again with the “ok”. At this point I decided that I wasn’t a huge fan of Katie’s.)

I was told to lie down on my stomach. Rather shakily, I obliged. The other tech, whose name I don’t know, was really nice to me and put his hand on my shoulder to try and calm the shakes out of me. The doctor came in and immediately my eyes seemed no longer able to hold in the tears. The doctor proceeded to tell me what he was going to do (a speech I heard little of due to what I believe are called internal defenses) and then he asked me if I had any questions. While I was shaking my head in the negative my mind was asking the doctor if it was ok for me to leave yet.

The first thing I remember after that, the doctor was saying something about how this was going to be the worst part and how it was going to burn a bit. The word, “burn”, alerted me. I am all too familiar with “burn” and I immediately tensed. The doctor was “numbing” (aka: giving me a few shots of lidocaine) the area of my back that he was going to “puncture” so that I wouldn’t “feel it”. Ha! I did not realize then that the doctor was making a joke.

A few minutes passed by and the doctor decided that it was time for the party to start. He told me he was going to insert the needle and that I was going to feel some “pressure”. Again, I was alerted. Whenever doctors have said that phrase to me in the past, it has ALWAYS, quite without fail, meant that pain will follow.

This instance was no different, except I had an announcer of sorts giving me the run-down of everything he was doing.
“Alright, Kelly,” the doctor said. “I am pushing the needle in a third of the way. Here comes a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle pressure.”
Kelly moans in pain.
“Okay. I’m going to push the needle in again…. moooooooore presssssssssssure….”
Kelly starts shaking and crying, albeit, silently.
“Last push and we’ll be all the way in. Pressurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre…..”
Kelly moans in pain once again. Kelly is wishing that someone would have thought to knock her out for this process.
“Alright, Kelly,” said the doctor. “Now it’s just going to take some time to collect the fluid we need. Please try to stay still so the needle does not move.”
Kelly freezes as though she’s been paralyzed. “Wait, wait,” she says internally. “No one said ANYTHING about the needle just SITTING there. I can feel it in there for pete’s-sake. How long does it have to stay there for? Ow. This SUCKS. I can feeeeeeeel IT! I seriously feel like puking right now. WHY did they NOT put me out for this? WHY??”

At this point in the procedure the nice tech asked me if I was feeling ok.
I promptly told him no and that I felt like I was going to be sick. Alarmed, the doctor asked me if I was going to vomit. I said, “Not yet…” To which the nice tech responded with putting a cold towel on my neck. (I was pretty sure I loved him at that point.)

It took about TWENTY MINUTES for the fluid to be collected. Yeah. Twen.Ty. And it was pure torture. I could feel just where the needle was and it just made me sick. It wasn’t like I just felt all this pain for twenty minutes, because it wasn’t like that. It was just that I knew that it was there. I could also feel it in there… really, really deep in there. And it made my stomach upset and my mind go kuh-razy. So.bad.

About halfway through the fluid collection phase I piped up and started abusing the nice tech as to why it was taking so long. He told me that the flow was about “average” and that “we” were halfway there.
ONLY. HALFWAY? And just WHAT is that “WE” business? That’s like when people say “WE are pregnant.” (I hate that… but I digress.)
I almost sat up with rage. I was sooo mad that I was at a loss for words. I just started to cry silently again.
And then the tech said, “Whoa.”
Yeah. Let me tell you. “Whoa,” is not a word you wanna hear when you have a foot long needle stuck inside of you.
Then he said, “Your flow just sped way up… this shouldn’t take too much longer.” ~ahem. lie.~
I asked, “Where is the doctor?” It has just occurred to me that I could no longer sense his horrific presence.
“He stepped out for a minute. He’ll be back when we’re about done.”
I don’t know… for some reason I thought that when a patient has a million foot needle stuck inside them, that doctors stick around for the WHOLE time it’s in there. Apparently, my assumptions were wrong.

After what seemed like FOREVER the tech pulled out the needle and pronounced the spinal tap over. I responded with crying. The tech let Tyson into the room and the crying got worse.
Not only did the procedure hurt, to me, it was like mind torture. I HATED knowing that the needle was in there, just how FAR it was in there, and that even though it wasn’t what I would term “painful”, I could still feeel it in there. ~shudder~

After a spinal tap you are supposed to lay flat on your back. For a LONG time. (This is what my eye doctor told me when he was ordering this procedure for me.) Well. After my spinal tap, I was “lucky” enough to only have to lay flat on my back for one. hour. And then, I was free to go. With NO discharge instructions. NONE.
Even I know that this is unheard of.

Not only was I free to go, I had to WALK (in my case, waddle) my way out of the hospital after such a horrific procedure. I could NOT believe that I didn’t even merit a WHEELCHAIR, for crying out loud! That procedure was no walk in the park…. I totally thought a wheelchair was in order. Alas, I was the only one who felt that way and waddle my way out to the car I did.

THREE. days. later. (said like the French announcer on Spongebob)
I am still laying FLAT on my back because I got the dreaded spinal headache. This is a horrific headache that results from a spinal tap “sometimes”. (Yeah… sometimes when you don’t lay flat on your back for long enough.) This horrific headache rears its ugly head every time you get up off your back. Your head literally feels as if it will explode. And you also get to feel REALLY nauseous as well. Yep. I haven’t showered in a day and a half now because the last time I did shower it took three hours for the resulting headache to go away even after I was laying flat on my back. The spinal headache SUCKS and it better go away soon. (Cuz next week is my last week of my Biology class and I CANNOT miss it.)

The results from the tap came in already and it looks like I have high pressure in my spinal column, which is indicative of a pseudotumor. (Hence the “whoa” to my flow, I guess…) I am not going to explain what a pseudotumor is here because it will take too long, is really boring, and it’s not even conclusive if that’s what I have. So click the link if you are interested. For those that aren’t, suffice it to say that a pseudotumor acts like a tumor but isn’t a tumor. Now I get to take a diuretic pill FOUR times EVERY day to see if my symptoms go away. If the meds work, then I do indeed have a pseudotumor. If not, it is back to the drawing board. By the way, the dirutic pill is making me pee like I am TEN months pregnant and I LOVE it. (ha!)

Wow. That is one long post.
Who read the whole thing?
Really.
Who made it?

So, on June 10th I was diagnosed with papilledema. For those that don’t want to click and read, that would mean that my optic nerve is swollen, and in my case the swollen nerve is in my right eye. For the last couple of months I have been noticing that the vision is my right eye has been fading in and out of sight and that my vision in that eye (when I had it) was hazy. I thought it would go away… I was wrong. Finally, the five to ten seconds of complete blindness in my right eye (which occurs so often I don’t even bother to count how many times it happens per day) became so overly-annoying that it was decided that I should get it checked out.

I was fairly sure that the eye doctor would be able to just give me some eye drops and I would be on my way. Of course, I was wrong. And I should have known… my life isn’t that easy and my health history isn’t that clean. The doctor looked at me and quite seriously told me that we needed to figure out the cause of the swelling so that the damage caused by the swelling would not be irreversible. (Meaning, this needs to be addressed asap so I don’t permanently go blind in my right eye. I guess I have a fairly large blind-spot in my right eye’s peripheral vision due to the swelling and it’s only going to get bigger until the swelling goes away.) I got an MRI on June 15th and it came back clean. No tumors. No M.S. Yay.

Tomorrow afternoon I get to have a spinal tap (”they” call it a lumbar puncture, but I know it really is a spinal tap).

This has hit me pretty hard if you can’t tell. I am beyond sick of things like this happening to me and I am not happy at the prospect of living a life where every two to three years I will be diagnosed with one more thing that can’t be cured and can’t even be very well treated. (If you are wondering why I would think my life would go that way it is because that is the way it has gone for the last DECADE.) I think I resent this SO much because I was just beginning to feel as if I was moving on with my life despite the RSD. I had finally told the RSD to go to hell and that I was going to live anyway… really live and do the things that I wanted to do despite the everyday/everynight burning pain. And look where the moving on got me. Right back in a doctors office with a bunch of non-answers right in front of my face. Again. But this time there is the added fun of the possibility of going blind in my right eye.

Seriously. Why I’m not screaming right now is beyond me.

In the meantime, however, I’ve got tons of pictures that I want to share!
Yay! People love pictures, right?
(And it is usually a sure-fire way to get certain people off my back for a while…)
Without further ado…
Both my kids graduated from something recently.
Helene from Preschool and Simon from Kindergarten.

I finished my four-week college algebra class with an A and was oh-so-happy when it ended. (I was not a fan of the professor or the fact that math 2 hours a day, five days a week was giving me terrifying “math dreams”.) I am still full-steam ahead on my pre-pharmacy pre-requisites and Tyson will officially be starting an MBA program in the fall. We are SO excited for him. He has wanted to go and get his masters degree for a very, VERY long time.
So. Even though the master plan has taken more than one U-Turn since its inception, I do believe things are going to turn out exactly how we want them to. Both of us get to finish our education and we have wanted that since, I don’t know, FOREVER ago! I am so thankful, beyond thankful, for this opportunity and pray that we continue to find ways to make this happen for us.

We still reside in the Small Place and I still struggle to find things that I like about it.
I have FINALLY made a friend though….. (Hi Trish!) and that has made living here so much easier. I have to admit, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to go through this adventure in the Small Place friendless… Luckily though, Trish seems to be able to put up with my crazy. YAY!

My new friend, however, can do nothing for my complete disdain for the local public radio controlled race-car track. (Yes… it is real. And it is as ugly as you think it would be.)
Which brings me to my new (and very neglected) segment called:

Now, remember. That monstrosity is on Main Street.
And that platform that people are supposed to be able to stand on to better see the race from?
Umyeah. It’s totally unusable because it wasn’t built to code.
And the best part?
I have YET to see anyone out there actually using it.
Nice, huh? I have to drive by that thing every day and every day I think about how ugly it is.
Tyson thinks it’s so funny how much I hate that RC park… but I can’t help it. I think it’s the chain-link fence, the unusable platform, and all the weeds growing up through the track from lack of use…. but I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being picky….

Now, for what I like about the Small Place… (That’s part of the rules of my new segment. I get to complain and then I have to say what I like about the Small Place.)
Actually, this is more like, what I LOVE about the Small Place.
The skies here are gorgeous!
I took some pictures to try and show how pretty it is, but I’m afraid the pictures don’t do the skies their proper justice… Apparently my camera is unable to capture just how blue the sky out here is. Seriously, it is SO blue that there are days that the clouds look fake… like something out of a painting.

There. How’s that for an effort at being positive?
I think I did pretty good on that one.

Anyway. I just wanted everyone to know that all in all we are happy and doing well. I will have some more news to share within the next few days, so stay tuned. I promise some drama very soon.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions regarding what I was taking this last semester and what I am aiming to do with my college education. Hopefully the following will not be too boring for you, but it probably will be…

This last semester I took Physical Geography, Conceptual Mathematics, Technical Writing, and Elementary Spanish. All that added up to fourteen credit hours…
And yes. I am crazy and I was busy.
I found out today that I ended up with straight.A’s and, obviously, I could not be happier about that. (Mainly because the field I want to go in pretty much demands a high GPA.)

So, what do I want to be when I grow up?
I decided about three years ago that when I went back to school that I would go with the aim of getting into Pharmacy School. I am still firm in that decision and will start taking all of my pre-requisite classes starting this summer. I get a lot of people telling me how hard Pharmacy School is going to be and that you need really good grades. I also get people telling me that you have to take a lot of math, a lot of science, and that it takes a long time to get through. (Like I didn’t know any of that, right?) I really don’t get why some people feel the need to point out the obvious and to try and dissuade me from even trying… But whatever. I know that this is something I can actually do and I know, I really know, that it is the right path for me to take.

Wow. I knew that was going to be a boring story… And now I feel the need to make it up to you with pictures.
These were taken the day before Easter.

Yep. They are cute and big and still BFF’s.